---
title: "Personal Mobility Data & The Future of Urban Transport Planning"
url: "https://www.systra.com/uk/expert_insights/personal-mobility-data-the-future-of-urban-transport-planning/"
type: expert_insights
date_published: 2025-03-04
date_modified: 2025-03-04
schema:
  @type: WebPage
language: en-GB
word_count: 633
reading_time: 4 min
canonical: "https://www.systra.com/uk/expert_insights/personal-mobility-data-the-future-of-urban-transport-planning/"
featured_image: "https://www.systra.com/uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2025/03/data-mobility-urban-transport-planning-5.jpg"
type-insight:
  - "Cities & Urban Mobility"
---

# Personal Mobility Data & The Future of Urban Transport Planning

![Personal Mobility Data & The Future of Urban Transport Planning](https://www.systra.com/uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2025/03/data-mobility-urban-transport-planning-5.jpg)

**Personal mobility data is behind the reframing of urban transport design and SYSTRA’s Neill Birch shared his thoughts on how this potential is set to transform the way we move through our cities.**

“Having access to a huge amount of data as we now have, should allow us to be
able to design urban and mobility infrastructure in a much more people focused
way than we have done in the past, which I think will be a real revolution.”

Neill’s belief is that planning is informed directly by the real journeys people
make; which enables the creation of smarter interchanges and more responsive
transport systems. Smart card technology (such as Oyster) was a stepping stone
into understanding a customer’s journey planning, but this has progressed into
the wider potential that we see today.

“We’re now able to understand people as customers making a whole journey. In the
past, all we knew was that a person had got on a bus or a train. We didn’t know
if that was the same person making two joined up journeys, or if that was two
different people.”

This insight, he explained, is crucial for optimising the overall passenger
experience, allowing operators to “drill down into” how journeys are chained
together, despite the limitations in personal data.

####  Volume of mobility data vs privacy

Addressing these challenges, Neill looked towards the hurdles facing the
industry.

“I think there are two challenges. I think challenge number one is simply the
sheer volume of data… you can imagine how many millions of passenger journeys
there are literally every single day. If I put myself into the shoes of those
people, I’d probably not be hugely worried in the days when I was traveling
with, say, a smart card or an Oyster card… but a lot more of these journeys are
now being made using bank cards… you need to have a big hearts and minds
campaign that just explains exactly how all of this data is anonymised and that
there is no linkage between a particular card being used and knowing who that
person is.”

#### A future of seamless travel experiences

The future needs to balance technological advancement with robust privacy
measures, but also consider a more seamless and unconstrained travel experience;

“I think that we are… moving into an era where people can travel in a way that
is much more unconstrained by the need, for example, to buy a particular ticket
or make use of a particular app… we can just switch our phone on in a different
country and just make use of it.”

An era where ticketing barriers fall away, paving the way for an integrated
transport system that caters effortlessly to the needs of both urban and rural
travellers could be possible by leveraging detailed, real-time data. We can
design systems that are not only more efficient, but also more intuitively
aligned with the needs of everyday commuters, while maintaining data privacy,
creating smarter, safer, and more responsive journeys.

[Get in touch with with Neil ](https://www.systra.com/uk/contact/)

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